Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 397 posts

Re: AI makes you boring

#301

Post by squidsoup »

kouru225 wrote: post #297
squidsoup wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit. Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.

>The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit Big opinions there. A large amount of art that you think comes from individual expression is often not. There are countless examples of artists that secretly used algorithmic processes. A great example is Vermeer: https://youtu.be/94pCNUu6qFY?si=M6UQ-XuHNtoj2-3a . This is what I mean about how…

Well aware of Hockney's work related to the use of technology in art, but there's a difference between producing purely algorithmic work and using a specific technique. Vermeer's style and work is still uniquely his.

> Historically, art was connected to religion, and therefore thought to be valuable because it was universal rather than individualistic and personal

If that were actually the case, we wouldn't be able to identify the style of individual artists and artisans, and yet we can of course, regardless of their intent. Giotto's only intent may have been to glorify god in his work, but of course, inevitably, his work is also a reflection of who he was.

This is precisely why AI art is so hideous and anti-humanistic - it can never been a singular reflection of the individual.

Re: AI makes you boring

#302

Post by kouru225 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #295
kouru225 wrote: post #175

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…

> Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one. While people do think like this, it misses the point. Yes, all forms of art is FULL of randomness and people copying each other. The thing that makes it special is that it took people going out and living and having experiences to create it. They have to actively absorb prior art, learn about it, analyze it, generally b…

Yea I definitely agree that AI has definitely a problem with spam, and that spam is effecting the art world negatively

Re: AI makes you boring

#303

Post by chillfox »

claudiulodro wrote: post #217
jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

> Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"? It's a good point: w…

Having used AI to write docs before, the value is in the guidance and review.

I started out with telling the AI common issues that people get wrong and gave it the code. Then I read (not skim, not speed, actually read and think) the entire thing and asked for changes. Then repeat the read everything, think, ask for changes loop until it’s correct which took about 10 iterations (most of a day).

I suspect the AI would have provided zero benefit to someone who is good at technical writing, but I am bad at writing long documents for humans so likely would just not have done it without the assistance.

Re: AI makes you boring

#305

Post by shimman »

saulpw wrote: post #293
jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

LLM-generated documentation is great for LLMs to read so they can code better and/or more efficiently. You can write it manually, but as I've discovered over the decades, humans rarely read documentation anyway. So you'll be spending a lot of time writing good for the bots.

This is odd to hear. All the best programmers I know are actually adamant readers of documentation, how else could you be a good programmer without reading the docs? I will say devs admitting to not reading docs does definitely explain how shit current software is from big tech.

Re: AI makes you boring

#306

Post by kouru225 »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #288
kouru225 wrote: post #175

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level. Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme exam…

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan.…

What you’re talking about is found object art so I’m confused. These objects are not created by the artist at all. In fact, they were created in a factory by machines. You’re responding to the story behind it, which is also something a LLM could’ve created. I understand if you’d feel betrayed if someone put a found object piece in a museum with a fake story created by an LLM, but let’s not pretend like a LLM is not capable of doing exactly that and getting the exact same response out of you provided that they can convince you it’s real. You might be tempted to argue that what’s real matters and what’s not doesn’t, but now you’re just stuck having to figure out what the hell is real or not. A lot of human biography is arguably fake already. I fw found object art in general, but let’s be clear: found object art is a great example of exactly what I’m talking about. It argues that art doesn’t need to be handmade with intention by an artist. Instead, it can be a random object, created by an environmental process that the artist has little control over

Re: AI makes you boring

#307

Post by [deleted] »

fhd2 wrote: post #136
Uehreka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do. If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code. Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested. I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far. But I guess as opp…

[deleted]

Re: AI makes you boring

#308

Post by selridge »

j2kun wrote: post #179
josefresco wrote: post #62

While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience a…

Can you elaborate on the implied claim that you've never built a project that you spent more than two months thinking about? I could maybe see this being true of an undergraduate student, but not a professional programmer.

Open your mind and try it.

Re: AI makes you boring

#309

Post by layer8 »

josephg wrote: post #271
ethmarks wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on whether you're only executing the code or if you're submitting it for humans to review. If your use case is so low-stakes that a review isn't required, then vibe coding is much more defensible. But if code quality matters even slightly, such that you need to review the code, then you run into the same problems that you do with AI-generated prose: nobody wants to read what you couldn't be bothere…

There’s lots of times where I just don’t care how it’s implemented. I got Claude to make a test suite the other day for a couple RFCs so I could check for spec compliance. It made a test runner and about 300 tests. And an html frontend to view the test results in a big table. Claude and I wrote 8500 lines of code in a day. I don’t care how the test runner works, so long as it works. I really just care about the test…

What is it about the tests that make you not care about how it’s implemented versus other code? Just the fact that it isn’t interesting to you? I happen to like spec-testing code and find it an interesting design space. It is vital to review it thoroughly for correctness. But I also think that whether I find something interesting or not doesn’t have much bearing on whether code quality is important. Code quality can even be more important for uninteresting code, because due to the lack of interest I’ll have a lower attention span when reviewing it.

Re: AI makes you boring

#310

Post by selridge »

topaz0 wrote: post #300
techgnosis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.

I dunno, I think the boosters show their hurt feelings here more often than the detractors do.

Lmfao. The front page is littered with whining about the craft from people who can’t argue coherently why I should go back to getting yelled at by a linter.

It’s all “I can’t think anymore” or “software bad now” followed by a critique of the industry circa 2015.

Most of the people making cool stuff with LLMs are making it, not writing blog posts hoping to be a thought leader.

Post reply on HN